The present study is concerned with the phonological structure, word recognition and the development process of how katakana-go loanwords in Japanese are pronounced, and its influence on the acquisition of L2 English as well as L2 Japanese.In 2003, we examined whether or not it is effective to introduce, at the earliest stage of English learning, English words which have phonetically similar katakana-go counterparts in Japanese. Using a tachistoscope and a CSL, we investigated if katakana-go loanwords would interfere with the pronunciation of L2 English words; and how the word familiarity of katakana-go loanwords would influence on the recognition of L2 English words. The results indicated that it is not effective to introduce English words with phonetically similar katakana-go counterparts in Japanese at the earliest stage of English learning.In 2004, we examined whether the phonological structure or word familiarity would more adequately account for accent flattening in Japanese kata
… Morekana-go loanwords. The rate of katakana-go loanwords with a flat accent pattern appearing in dictionaries is high when they have the -LL ending, viz. LLLL and HLL, but we found it cannot fully explain why katakana-go loanwords tend to be pronounced with the flat accent; and that among English words pronounced with the flat accent, those which have high familiarity tend to have high-familiarity loanword counterparts in Japanese, and that katakana-go loanwords whose familiarity is high have high-familiarity counterparts in English and tend to be pronounced with the flat accent. We confirmed again accent flattening was significantly correlated with word familiarity.We conducted the same experiments with Taiwanese students learning Japanese and found accent flattening happened with Japanese students but not the Taiwanese students. The results indicate that an effective teaching method might be to focus on phonetic perception of English words, especially at the earliest stage of English learning. Less